Health
Related: About this forumWhy Can’t We Fall Asleep?
BY MARIA KONNIKOVA
This is the first piece in a three-part series on sleep. The second concerns sleeping and dreaming.
Heres whats supposed to happen when you fall asleep. Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm upthe temperature changes likely help the circadian clocks throughout your body to synchronize. Melatonin courses through your systemthat tells your brain its time to quiet down. Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows. Your breathing evens out. You drift off to sleep.
That, at least, is the ideal. But going to sleep isnt always a simple process, and it seems to have grown more problematic in recent years, as I learned through a series of conversations this May, when some of the worlds leading sleep experts met with me to share their ongoing research into the nature of sleeping. (The meetings were facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship.) According to Charles Czeisler, the chief of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Womens Hospital, over the past five decades our average sleep duration on work nights has decreased by an hour and a half, down from eight and a half to just under seven. Thirty-one per cent of us sleep fewer than six hours a night, and sixty-nine per cent report insufficient sleep. When Lisa Matricciani, a sleep researcher at the University of South Australia, looked at available sleep data for children from 1905 to 2008, she found that theyd lost nearly a minute of sleep a year. Its not just a trend for the adult world. We are, as a population, sleeping less now than we ever have.
The problem, on the whole, isnt that were waking up earlier. Much of the change has to do with when we choose to go to bedand with how we decide to do so. Elizabeth Klerman is the head of the Analytic and Modeling Unit, also in the Sleep and Circadian Disorders division at Brigham and Womens Hospital. Her research tracks how multiple individual differences in our environment affect our circadian rhythms and our ability to fall asleep easily and soundly. When you go to bed affects how long you can sleep, no matter how tired you are, she told me.
A wide array of factors can determine just how quickly youll be able to drift off to sleep when you choose to do so. To determine their relative importanceand separate the things that truly make a difference from the ones that arent all that essentialKlerman first assesses her subjects habits and histories: What is their sleep-wake historythat is, what are their usual routines, and what are the problems theyve encountered in the past? What about pharmaceuticals: Which do they use, and are any targeted as sleeping aids? Once this information has been gathered, she brings them to the lab, monitors their sleep in a controlled environment, and determines how each of the various factors affects the ability to fall asleep.
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http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/why-cant-we-fall-asleep
postulater
(5,075 posts)Never have.
katmondoo
(6,457 posts)There is no help from doctors as to why.
CTyankee
(63,914 posts)just concentrating on breathe in, breathe, out slowly...it helps and I drift off to sleep soon after. if thoughts of other things intrude in your meditation, you just gently push them aside and go on to concentrate on your breathing....it works, really...